Tuition at Learn-to-Code Boot Camp Is Free — Until You Get a Job

Anthony Woo and April Goldman work together during a two person exercise at App Academy. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired

In a few months, another graduating class of college students will stumble out into an unforgiving job market weighed down by staggering debt. But one school in one of the hottest hiring markets in the country is flipping the script on student loans: until you get a job, you don’t pay.

App Academy in San Francisco (and now New York) offers a 9-week, 90-hours-a-week boot camp to turn programming novices into code jockeys. They just graduated their second class last Friday. Of the fifteen students to graduate from the first class, fourteen have found jobs, co-founder Kush Patel says. Typical annual salary, he says: more than $80,000.

“We don’t want to charge up front because we feel pretty strongly about tying the payment to the outcome,” says Patel. “If they can’t find a job, we’ve screwed up somehow.”

In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, he’s not wrong. Qualified programmers in cities like San Francisco and New York fend off recruiters as multiple companies bid for their services. New recruits signing up for App Academy promise to pay 15 percent of what they earn during their first year on the job, payable over the first six months after they start working. For the school, the math isn’t too shabby if they succeed at placing their students. If 15 students get jobs at $80,000 salaries, that works out to a $180,000 commission.

App Academy’s model reverses the traditional incentive structure for higher education. If you’re paying out of pocket for schooling, then the onus is on you to get the most out of the experience that you can. In other words, you want to get your money’s worth. At App Academy, Patel says, the instructors are motivated to give you the highest quality learning experience they can, since the school doesn’t get paid if you don’t learn.

In the current job market, at least, the only worry for App Academy is if students decide to squander the investment the school has made in them. For example, after all the intensive instruction they decide they don’t want to be programmers.

“The risk to us is students might want to go back to school or start their own business— or simply change their minds,” Patel says. “We’re actually very confident students can get jobs.”

To keep students on track, App Academy requires them to sign a good-faith agreement that they will pursue jobs as developers when they graduate. They also have to pony up a $3,000 refundable deposit to hold their spots and show they’re committed. (Patel says they’re sometimes flexible on the deposit, depending on a student’s circumstances.)

Admission to the school is competitive. Prospective students are asked to read an intro to coding and then take a timed coding test, as well as a live coding test during an admissions interview. The intent isn’t to show previous coding knowledge, but rather programmer potential. The admission rate is “sub-10 percent,” Patel says.

Though most students so far have been college graduates, they’re coming into the program with a range of life experience. The average age is 28, and the classes include many mid-career switchers as well as recent grads. Most of the first class was unemployed when they came in and, Patel says, couldn’t have afforded a big up-front tuition payment: They were “people who didn’t have enough capital to invest in themselves.” Finding a job for most after the class was over, Patel says, took an average of four weeks.

As a former hedge fund analyst, 25-year-old Patel would appear to know something about investing. His co-founder, 26-year-old Ned Ruggeri, knows something about code: before starting App Academy, he was a developer on Google’s search index team.

Though the curriculum is centered on learning web development, with an emphasis on Ruby on Rails and Javascript, Patel says the goal is to train full-fledged software engineers.

“It’s just a skill that doesn’t come easy to everyone and is just so valuable,” Patel says. For App Academy, the value of that skill—and the instructors’ talent at passing it on—is what will keep the lights on not just for graduates but the school itself. “We will always have significant skin in the game,” Patel says. “For every student.”